News archive

Dascha Sekeris-Abelman would like to tell the story of her mother, the Holocaust survivor Markéta Ledererová. Her search for clues has meanwhile led the Dutchwoman to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, accompanied by her daughter Jindra Bausewein-Sekeris, her niece Françoise de Gooijer-van Aalsburg...

On 2 September 1939, just one day after the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II, the Nazis erected the Stutthof concentration camp, 21 miles east of Gdansk. 78 years later, the International Tracing Service (ITS) was now able to hand over the personal belongings of a former prisoner to his family. The...

Miroslaw Wozniewicz is the son of a survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp. He and his family recently received a visit from Malgorzata Przybyla, an International Tracing Service (ITS) employee, at their home in Jeziora Wielkie near Bydgoszcz. Przybyla had something to return to them: personal items once...

Patrick Vereecke is researching his grandfather’s fate. The SS deported Leopold Vereecke from his native Rièzes, a town in Belgium. He never returned home. His grandson recently visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen to have a look at documents testifying to Leopold Vereecke’s persecution.

The International Tracing Service (ITS) is receiving further aid in the amount of 20,000 euros for the preservation of its archival holdings. It plans to apply these funds toward the deacidification and restoration of layout plans from concentration camps as well as maps indicating the routes of death marches. Under...

On the night of August 2, 1944, Nazis murdered 2,897 men, women and children from the so-called gypsy family camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. They were the last remaining deportees in the camp. Altogether some 500,000 Roma and Sinti fell victim to the National Socialist policy of extermination in Europe. August 2 marks...

The International Tracing Service (ITS) and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) are jointly offering a three-day research seminar in Bad Arolsen. Interested students and doctoral candidates are invited to apply for...

The sisters Nicole van Winkoop-Schleicher and Monique Buitenhuis-Schleicher never knew their grandfather Johan Pieter Mackenbach. All the more surprised were they when, in March 2017, they received a message from the Dutchwoman Annelies Sijtsma-Hoezen on Facebook: “The Online Archive of the International Tracing...

Didier Vignolles visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) to see the original documents from Buchenwald concentration camp regarding the fate of his great-grandfather Guillaume Carles. Guillaume Carles was arrested with two comrades in early 1943 because they had established a secret cell of the Communist Party...

Czesław Bilnik from Zawiercie in Poland was imprisoned in the Gross-Rosen and Neuengamme concentration camps. Just days before the war ended in May 1945, he died in the tragic sinking of the CAP ARCONA in the Bay of Lübeck. Seventy-two years later, with the aid of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), his...